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Lot Essay
Dr. Henry Adams, a committee member for the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation, writes in an unpublished letter that the present work is "a study for a very important painting by [Benton], Cotton Pickers, 1945, which was recently acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago--their most important American acquisition in a good many years. In 1942 Benton was hired by the American Tobacco Company to produce paintings of the harvesting and sorting of tobacco to be used in advertisements for Lucky Strike. For this purpose he made several trips to the South, including a trip to Georgia where he sketched African-Americans handling tobacco. My guess is that while he was in Georgia he sketched cotton-picking as well and that his drawings from this excursion provided the basis for the current painting...Benton had made earlier trips throughout the South, both in 1928 and in the early 1930s, but my belief is that this painting was mostly derived from his drawings of 1942."
The present study represents an important step in Benton's creative process, as Adams explains, "After making sketches from life during his travels, Benton first developed the design of his paintings by making a clay model, and then executed color studies such as this to work through issues of color and composition. The 'touch' of this painting is very characteristic. Generally speaking he worked quite quickly but with great intelligence, and as you follow the brushwork you can see how he was thinking about the spatial organization of the design and placement of different colors in a harmonious pattern."
Compositionally the present version is very similar to the final painting. Adams compares, "The major change is that in the Chicago painting, Benton added a sleeping baby on the right hand side, a change which led him to rethink that whole side of the design. He also readjusted the figures on the left to create a more ribbon-like band of figures that sweeps across the middle-ground of the painting. To my mind, the game of comparing the two almost doubles the pleasure of studying this painting--since you can both view it as a step towards the development of the later work, and as a remarkably complete and successful artistic statement in its own right."
(unpublished letter, 2015)
The present study represents an important step in Benton's creative process, as Adams explains, "After making sketches from life during his travels, Benton first developed the design of his paintings by making a clay model, and then executed color studies such as this to work through issues of color and composition. The 'touch' of this painting is very characteristic. Generally speaking he worked quite quickly but with great intelligence, and as you follow the brushwork you can see how he was thinking about the spatial organization of the design and placement of different colors in a harmonious pattern."
Compositionally the present version is very similar to the final painting. Adams compares, "The major change is that in the Chicago painting, Benton added a sleeping baby on the right hand side, a change which led him to rethink that whole side of the design. He also readjusted the figures on the left to create a more ribbon-like band of figures that sweeps across the middle-ground of the painting. To my mind, the game of comparing the two almost doubles the pleasure of studying this painting--since you can both view it as a step towards the development of the later work, and as a remarkably complete and successful artistic statement in its own right."
(unpublished letter, 2015)